WCP1710

[1]

Broadstone, Wimborne

Jan[uar]^y 18th. 1908

Dear Sir Oliver Lodge¹

I was just finishing up a nearly 2 year job of Editing a fellow naturalists Journals, Letters, Notes &c. when your letter arrived or I should have replied sooner.

As to your first question — as to "intelligent life" possibly existing at —100°, nothing can be said because we as yet know almost nothing of the spirit or soul — body. But if it means life in an organised material body, which I presume is what people always [2] do mean when they talk of the planets being inhabited — These — always assuming as proved the practical identity of matter, elements, & laws of matter throughout the material universe — we have simple reason to assert that such life could not exist, — or rather could not have come into existence in the simplest forms and developed slowly upwards into the "intelligent beings" we are talking about. The two things are not the same. The highly developed organism may be become adapted to resist heat & cold which the unicellular [3] ancestral forms ^{(mere masses of protoplasm)} could not possibly do. Of course if you deny "the uniformity of matter" you can predicate nothing one way or the other.

(2) As to the possibility of high forms of life existing in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, I admit the possible possibility but not the probably possibility. I mean, that we have no more right to say that it is "possible" than to say that it is "impossible", as we have not a particle of evidences to go upon either way.

I therefore consider that any postulate of "possibility" merely because we can not assert [4] "impossibility", should never be introduced into any problem of science. In fact, to do so renders all rational and truly scientific reasoning impossible.

I am contemplating a work in which I shall treat some of these questions more fully than I have hitherto done, and think I shall be able to show that the whole weight of ^the evidence, as well as the fundamental probabilities — are against any intelligent organised material beings, having been developed anywhere else than on our earth.

Yours very truly | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]